


every penny of it

by marketchippie



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - James Bond Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-06
Updated: 2016-01-06
Packaged: 2018-05-12 05:52:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5654824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>MI6 hadn’t cared if she was degenerate. So long as she was theirs.</p><p>[Penny Dreadful as James Bond, starring Vanessa Ives as Moneypenny and as secret weapon.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	every penny of it

**Author's Note:**

> No archive warnings apply, but the typical Penny Dreadful warnings certainly do, which is to say that everything is weird incest even when it is not blood incest. Beyond that: period-typical institutional prejudices involved, Light MKUltra.

**** Three years in and her life here is good, lived-in: Vanessa at the desk, work already half-done when Malcolm comes through with the scent of smoke in his hair, the only hint of something amiss. Always as though he’s been through the back end of hell and come out the better for it. Nothing in his long career has ever left a mark on him.

Nothing but one or two things. One of which arranges his papers now, her short tidy typist’s nails painted a red-violet she keeps up, a shade he hates but will never say anything about. He plucks a file up from under those hands of hers. “Miss Ives,” he says, eyes bright on hers, one hand caught up in his. He drops a kiss to the back of it, even as he’s already going.

The door to Sembene’s office opens and shuts. She smiles and feels the kiss linger on her skin like a brand, the scratch of his beard echoing on her skin. The soft burn of it stretches as she closes her hand into a fist, then opens it again. Only a moment lost to abstraction before she’s back to work.

She is safe, in the heart of the thing that made her monstrous, among her fellow monsters.

 

 

He gave her the job after everything happened at school, everything with Mina and the war. After the war was over—with only some casualties on their side. Some.

She wasn't special, not then. Not yet.

Malcolm, uniquely, still sees what he first saw. The girl, not the device. She does not know if it is better, only that it keeps her sane—that she can look at herself in the mirror and know at least one person in the world sees what she sees.

Her face remains the same. Of the soul, she can’t say—only that there is something of a relief that her memory resides with him, whose soul never challenges hers for a place in the light. For anything, really. If he doesn’t have a soul, as some have said in the office, it has only made him better at his job.

If he has, then—she is its best evidence, now. A heavy burden, she thinks; easier if neither of them has anything to claim at all.

 

 

Sembene’s office door opens just a crack, enough to invite her and her files in. She takes a quick look around the empty room. The top of his globe is split open, the world cut in half to better hold drinks. Only the bottom half left intact; their home, obliterated to make room for scotch and gin. At least she knows it’s the very best money can buy—that’s her work. The numbers that don’t mean anything but themselves. Not spending so much as making sure the checks don’t bounce. “Where’s he gone?” she asks.

Sembene’s eyes flick to the window, the balcony, and back to her. She huffs out a small laugh and sits in his chair. “He’ll die like that some day. He’s getting on.”

“I won’t let him.”

“Too valuable,” she says, and he nods. No other reason: MI6 does not foster fondness.

There are twinned sets of scars down Sembene’s cheeks, markers of another life that she knows better than to ask after. “How can you stand it?” she asked him once, early, the globe broken open for her benefit. “The things he’s done—”

“I’ve done worse, Miss Ives,” he’d replied somberly. “Twice over.” A hand to each cheek.

He will have had to. They all do the same things to get by. This high up, there’s no one without blood on their hands. Not even their secretary, with her hair pinned up, dressed in austere black. Not even the girl from nowhere.

 

 

_A little war orphan_ , the Murray family had teased her, gently, for her mother had died while she was in her second year of university—in causes wholly unrelated of course. _Little foundling,_ because she kept the cross around her neck long past the point where it was fashionable to show off that she’d been baptized once. The Murrays believed in themselves first and foremost, and in their right to say and do as they liked. Their cruelty was gentle and common, the natural result of money left to grow old. Even from Mina, whom she knew loved her. Even Mina’s father, whom she knew did not hate her. Who stuck around even in wartime—who had done enough time, and more than enough action, in prior wars to be rather desultory with this one. For Vanessa’s part, she could not figure out how he came and went, what was asked of him from queen and country. She didn’t know his history, not then. Only that it was excessive.

They’d taken her in over the summer, or Mina had, had closed her hand over Vanessa’s on the last day and slid a train ticket into her closed fingers. So it was to the Murray country manor she went for the summer, ignoring her own funereal home, and sometimes they were chaperoned and sometimes not. Every now and again, they’d wake to breakfast already set out by the cook and cooling, with no other company in the house. The office door open just a crack. “Don’t go in,” he’d told them, but too waggishly to be a true Bluebeard about it—so of course they’d go in, Mina in his chair, Vanessa with her cheek on the head of the great tigerskin rug.

Mina had a father (nameless to her then) that was a killer, arrogant enough to put his history of bloodshed on display. But she hadn’t thought anything of it, in the way she hadn’t thought anything of Mina’s ease sitting a horse and shooting at foxes—the predilections of the landed gentry, when her own family had had nothing but a name that used to mean something, not even a title anymore. With her parents gone, hardly even that.

She hadn’t thought to look for medals, or anything of the like. Had she looked, she would have seen no evidence of valor. Nothing like that.

Now she knows: he kills with a license, steady-handed but indiscriminate.

 

 

The numbers aren’t her sole job. More often than not, Malcolm isn’t in the office, and if anyone’s to meet a connection over drinks or dinner, better it be a pretty face, one who’s not an obvious threat. (Her gun, small and burning, kept secret in her purse.) The other thing—her quick thinking, the nakedness of their thoughts—they don’t talk about. Keep it pleasant, Miss Ives: right.

The American connection knows better, though. Knows she’s not nobody.

Lunch, then, in a public place. Chandler already at the table—“Did you already order?”

“I flatter myself,” he says with that sliding cowboy grin, “that I know what you like by now.”

She touches a hand to her heart, smiling back. He never will.

She knows him, though. Knows his cards and how he plays them. That it’s kindness under the bravura. That, more than the gun in his briefcase or the blackmail-bargaining in his folders, makes it hard to be around him sometimes. “What is it today?” she asks.

“Same as it ever is.” He leans in, frowning nobly for his country. “We’re getting outpaced by a bunch of Siberian huskies.”

“Do you mean the Russian Federation in particular, or are you referring to the half of Europe outside your diplomatic jurisdiction?”

“No, ma’am. No vagueness here. This comes straight from the heart.”

“Yours?” she asks, and his eyebrows bunch in the middle with vividly-drawn confusion, face too open for his line of work. Then again, that’s a card he knows he holds. Good old American charm. She smiles again.

“Theirs,” he says. “Straight out of Leningrad. The uninhabited heartland, not the unbalanced north. There’s things they don’t even want their own to see.”

“What are you talking about?” she asks, and he leans in again.

“Experiments. Special experiments. _Human_ experiments.”

A sliver of ice slides down her spine, beneath her blouse. She straightens. “What particular brutality this time?”

“Pure destruction wrapped in a pretty package,” he says, she might even say _intones_ , and she pushes back her chair.

“This is the sort of thing you should be taking to Murray directly. The unwrapping of packages is his department.”

Ethan Chandler wrinkles up his forehead again, comes dangerously close to a blush. “I didn’t mean to offend,” he says. “I’m not getting in between whatever you two—”

“For heaven’s sake,” she says, impatient, glad of his distraction, “it’s work, no more. Back to work, Mr. Chandler.”

“Yes, ma’am. All I meant to say is, they look like you or I. If they want to affect their clients—” He takes off his hat, raising it lightly in her direction. “I suspect they take more after you. But they can outthink the pair of us put together. If they stand close and the wind’s right, my report says they can take the measure of an entire building. Their _thoughts_ , Miss Ives.”

Cold again.

Their drinks arrive.

“Mr. Chandler,” she says, picking up her martini and forcing herself to laugh, to be calm, “this is Murray’s order, not my own.”

“The twist of lemon—that’s not you?”

“Oh.” She sips. “Indeed. You’ve got a bit of both of us here. But it’s all right. I’m not finicky about what I drink.”

He slides the file across the table, underneath her fingertips. “Look it over. We’re looking for turncoats, insiders. No pictures yet. Just a few names and a code to crack.”

She slides it open and the numbers run forward and back in front of her eyes until they cross, familiar as a kiss on the forehead from a friend she’d supposed was dead. Above the table, Ethan Chandler is watching her closely. “We thought you might know it,” he says. “It looks like one of yours.”

 

 

She and Mina were young enough that they hadn’t fully known the details of the assorted massacres the world over, hadn’t known about Germany, had been preoccupied thinking about _Germans_ and how to fight them. An Enemy, capital E. At school, it had been a wonderful challenge, and if as the numbers of boys in their classes had dwindled, well, she hadn’t been looking for boys. She hadn’t seen further than the tip of her own nose, than her own reflection—no. Than Mina’s.

It hadn’t been pathological narcissism, whatever the government had said. What a mouthful MI6 had had to say about her. Abnormal sexuality, she remembers, delusions and chronic self-regard: she’s read her own papers thin now that she has access to them. Read them until their horrors and cruelties became nothing more than clerical errors.

And they _are_ errors; she knows better. Knows the human mind and heart well enough, by now, to trust the memories that had held up. It had been pure between her and Mina, nothing but pure, nothing but good, even if they had known enough to keep it secret.

Mina’s bright gold hair, her brilliant mathematical mind, her brilliant flushed cheeks when she hit upon the solution, when she rewrote the world to her design: impossible not to love her. Impossible not to kiss her in her moments of triumph, to swear alliance to whatever cause would have her.

They had her at once, whether by rights of brains or blood: MI6 had Mina in their pocket the moment she’d received her first year’s marks at Cambridge. And so they had picked up Vanessa along the way, as though she travelled in a secret compartment in Mina’s luggage, the inner stitching of her jacket, the strap of her stocking garter. Unseen, and yet so carefully placed. She hadn’t had Mina’s genius, oh no, not the literature student, not the dreamy margin-scribbler who hadn’t even grown out of her schoolgirl Catholicism, but she made a quick typist and she wanted to stay. And Mina, Mina _Murray_ , wanted her to stay.

So she there she was, semipermanently placed as Mina wrote the state’s numbers and letters into her own secret language, forward and back, forward and back.

It would have taken a very deaf ear to have picked up none of her language.

 

 

She sighs into her flat after dark, still half-nauseated from lunch’s meal of intelligence, still on high guard. The comfort of home, of turning and locking the key after her, is finite. She knows better than to trust the locks. Her home is not her own; her name is not on the flat’s lease.

Lights on and off behind her as she walks through the kitchen. On in the living room—she swallows a gasp, then settles. Calm between her shoulders at last, calm hand in hand with recognition.

Here he is: the rent money, her boss, and by rights the second bed in the rooms upstairs, for all it’s left to gather dust most nights. He’s a suite at the Savoy and too many friends to spend time here. Except now, lifting his head and denying that he was ever asleep on her—their—couch.

She sits down beside him. “Hello, Malcolm,” she says lightly. When she places her head on his shoulder she can smell the liquor on his breath, the whisper of perfume lingering by his cheek and hair. “You’re home early.”

He puts his arm around her and, whether she likes it or not—what put her there, what tethers them—his touch settles her. She can hear her own heart, loud in her ears. The silence is tissue-thin around them as she thinks of how she's inevitably going to tear it. 

_Your daughter, my lover, is dead. But her work is still alive._

Her hand raises to touch her cross, beneath her blouse: _help_ , she thinks, if not anticipating an answer.

As natural as breathing, he presses his lips to her temple, and she bites her tongue. “You keep this house a home, Miss Ives,” he says ruefully, and as little as she likes the idea of tending a near-empty flat for MI6’s sake, she feels it come alive around them. Together, they provide a heart and the inconvenient blood that runs through it: heaven knows they’ve enough blood stored up between them to spare.

She has so few spots of sweetness in her history; it is necessary, now and again, amidst the darkness or the simple tedium, to transport herself back.

An easy path back into it, too. She only needs look Malcolm in the eye. Even if the sweetness is corrupted. She doesn’t exactly have her pick of fruits.

Their blood is suffused with the same poisons; that is reassurance enough.

 

 

Even in the Murray house, she and Mina had slept in the same bed. “Nobody will mind,” Mina had said lightly, surely, something dark at the back of her expressions. She hadn’t named the nobodies. The better to class her father as inconsequential, his unseen presence as insignificant as that of the servants’. This would be their Eden, outside the law. The law had been irrelevant to them: who would legislate against _them_ , if they knew? If they understood this: Mina’s mouth on hers, Mina’s light confident hand between her legs, Mina’s eyes lit up and sure when she looked her in the eye. Always so, so sure.

An accident, then, one night, the door left midway open. Careless. But they’d never known whether or not there’d be anyone in the house, that vast wonderful comfortable house that made itself so available to them. Too comfortable.

She’d seen nothing but Mina, until Mina had dipped her head to kiss Vanessa’s throat and Vanessa had looked up and out, clear through the crack in the doorway. And the set of eyes on the other side had looked back.

These things she had seen: the smudge of blood on the white collar, the glass of scotch sloshing in an unsteady hand. Mina’s tongue on her throat drawing a sound out of her like a knife over metal as the man turned his back and retreated down the halls. He could have been a mirage, a spirit in the night, a shadow on the wall.

Later, she had known better. The fame of Malcolm Murray’s flesh-and-blood career, twofold: That he could slip in and out of a place unseen, undetected, could make it his own the moment of stepping into it. That he believed, the moment he stepped into a room, that it belonged wholly to him—that, he’d been born to; that, MI6 had found in him, had not had to provide. And that what belonged to him included the women in his path.

If she had been what she is now, what might she have heard him think as he looked through the door.

 

 

Things aren’t what they were. Mina is dead, the code ring tabled since the end of the war, and the fabled Agent Murray has more grey in his hair than dark. They don’t expect a gunfight, not now. Don’t anticipate one, at least not in the office. Whether or not he might want one—it’s not beyond considering, but it’s immaterial. Sembene’s department would prefer their top agent alive, even if _top_ is at present a function of legacy. The war is cooling, as is the heat in the blood. Meant to be, anyhow.

Vanessa gives her code, and what she knows, freely. To MI6, not to him. _Your daughter is alive somewhere. A bullet can kill many things, but not a legacy._

Perhaps that would reassure him. But she owes him too much to test it. Someday, life will see him dead; she knows that every time she sees the back of him. She won’t hasten that.

Her most constant comfort, a man she should hate. Far nearer her heart than crown or country.

 

 

He had come to her. When she was left alone in the student flat, he had come to her first.

She had been sitting; she had been quiet. No questions asked. The empty bed had answered them. The empty bed, and months of peace turned to weeks of MI6 sniffing after a potential promotion, weeks of _you’re your father’s daughter, after all._ They already had an office ready for her, the MURRAY plaque intact from its first bronze.

The smile, when they praised her, had never gone all the way to her eyes. Vanessa, who’d seen her smile there, had seen it up from the heart, had seen it _hers_ , knew the difference.

Always so sure, Mina, the numbers clear in her head, always seeing the change in the wind a moment before it shifted. When Vanessa awoke to an empty bed, she knew immediately. The cause of defection, and the price.

Nothing to do but live—she had no connections like _that_ , no false passport, no neat stacks of foreign currency under the bed. (She’d checked for traces, found a floorboard loose. Coincidence, convenience.) Live, then, and wait. She’d tried to make her way through the jitters, to quiet her heart with the evidence that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Evidence in absence, less than reassuring. She, Mina Murray’s typing fingers (touching fingers), hadn’t done anything wrong.

She had tried her best that day: to start a paperback novel, to eat a pear. One chapter, two bites, three knocks at the door. Then, left unanswered, the doorknob began to turn.

Every room Malcolm Murray has ever entered has belonged to him. She envies him that.

But she hadn’t known, then. The doorknob, like the next page, had turned on its own, betokened a horror story. Then the silhouette contained in the door-frame cut itself into shape, then he’d moved inside, then at last she’d felt the stillness of the deer on the road. All the same, the jitters had left her. His presence was, if nothing else, a certainty.

“Mr. Murray.”

“Miss Ives,” he’d said with a frown. “I hear my daughter’s gone.”

She’d shrugged, the bitten pear browning in her hand. “We need groceries. She should be back soon.”

He said, very simply, “No.”

Her breath had left her. Scrutinizing her after the axe had fallen, his hand had gone to his own face, acting as her mirror. “You’ve got something,” he said, fingers on the edge of his cheek, and when she’d turned and caught her reflection in the microwave she’d seen it: the light echo of lipstick on her own, a grace-note goodbye.

Into the bathroom, to clean her face; into the bedroom, to tidy her heart. Under the pillow, a slip of paper, a row of numbers written in familiar pencil. Nothing more.

Meanwhile, Mr. Murray sat in her kitchen, at her table, making himself at home—him and his companions. MI6 eyes on every surface. His cologne in the air, state secrets in a brown folio on the table, the echo of the war in the room between them, uninvited as he was.

The room was no longer Vanessa’s when she came back out, but then again, her name had never been on the lease. She had slept in a borrowed bed, invited in by love and coincidence. Mina’s clock ticked the seconds down, now, counting down the borrowed minutes. She felt whole countries watching her in her own kitchen, her in her untidy dress, her skin on fierce alert beneath.

“They’ll need to ask you some questions,” he had said. “They won’t hurt you.”

This had been a lie. Not, she thought—still thinks—one he meant.

She had put a hand to her mouth. In it, the slip of paper. A twitch of her thumb, and then it had gone between her lips, to be swallowed whole. Her first treason.

“I understand,” said Mr. Murray, who did not.

But as they had waited for his coworkers to come through the door, he had taken her hand.

Her first treason, and her last.

 

 

Out of the beast’s head and into its belly: tech and science department. Victor comes out of the basement with his arms cautiously open to her; she flinches only into the first second embrace. That’s not fair of her: she keeps the flinch from him. She has the luxury of keeping her thoughts to herself.

His heart speeds, swift as a rat on the wheel, the hair at his temples rank with sweat. “V,” she says, teasing. “Take care of yourself.”

“And you?” he asks. Pulling back, he looks close. “Are you all right? The doses—”

“Same as always,” she says, waving him away. “I’m fine. This is business. _Our_ business, V.”

It’s not his fault he came in ahead of her, thinking only ever in abstracts and potentials. Of the limits of the human form and the untapped vastness of the human mind.

He didn’t know her, when he put his designs to paper. She wasn’t the first person he hurt, she wouldn’t be the last, and she’s not the only one he loved along the way.

Love and monstrosity unites them all. She hands him the folder from Chandler, the code she’s painstakingly diagrammed, like handing Mina Harker’s heart all over again. Not a betrayal that counts any more. This is the cost of patriotism, of a war that’s burrowed its way beneath the skin.

 

 

This is her name on the file; the purpose: a witness in government custody, an imperfect girl in need of several fixes. A sinner, says the worn-in Catholic in her, childishly. Schoolgirlishly—though, never Mina’s favorite part of her company, so perhaps not.

This is in the notes: _sexual aberrations, histrionic personality, weak will,_ a litany of pathologies to be cured.

This is her memory: blank, wordless, a burnt taste on the back of her tongue. (Electrodes on the back of her neck, the edge of a knife making space beneath her fingernails. A chemical cure for her pathologies, but that wasn’t all: a body for something better, for state work. A chance to make up—whose sins? Hers, of course, no one else here to carry them.)

An experiment. Of the power of the mind— _yours more powerful than you think, Patient Ives_ —

Sanctuary, they’d called it.

(Electrodes at her temples, and the shock everywhere her skin would carry. Then deeper, the ache beneath her skull, a needle sinking into the hollow of her skull.)

Sanctuary.

Safe.

State-faithful.

_She makes a pretty picture, at least,_ as she had slept. When she had woken, her body was no longer her own, but the picture remained the same. She had recognized herself exactly in the mirror, and that had been the worst of all.

 

 

The agony had ended, eventually, and then she was theirs—Britain’s, MI6’s, a new daughter fashioned in their desired image. Or she could be. The fidelity, her newfound purpose, was written in her body, but she needed to be tested. Of course.

When they let her out, she had no home to call her own, and no one to call.

She had not had to.

Malcolm Murray had crossed her path in the lobby, with such ease it might have been coincidence had she not known better—she was starting to understand him, how he was placed in his locations like a bishop in a skilled chessman’s game, always moving on the diagonal. But that meant she had someone to drive her home, and a home to go to.

“There’s a spare bed in my London flat,” he’d said, and she hadn’t had to ask to whom it had belonged. There was no trace of Mina left in the room, of course—before she’d been a traitor, she’d been a daughter, but the duty of the daughter was to leave, of course, in the end. To become her own woman. Well, she was somebody’s, now. Somewhere in Russia, golden-haired, brilliant, spilling out victories at every turn.

“We’ll find her,” Malcolm promised.

The sun lanced through the window, jolting through Vanessa’s head with knifelike clarity, and she knew this was home to her: home was belonging, and she knew inevitably she would never belong anywhere else. 

She was made like this, to a purpose.

But the purpose is a bygone, and they do not talk about it. She wears prescription sunshades and puts a chloral compound in her morning tea and rarely gets headaches at work.

Proven loyal, her job performed. Not all the way to freedom, but the work offers protection, without questions. In the company of people that understand.

Vanessa Ives sits behind her desk—which is Malcolm Murray’s desk, which is in its turn Sembene’s desk—and makes the world turn paper after paper, carbon copy after carbon copy. Sometimes she recognizes the names. (Folders filed next to her own: Proteus, Caliban, Lily. She’d met them, once or twice between the procedures, the man named John with the soft voice and the scarred foreheaded, the girl named Brona who laughed with all her teeth. The successes. In the field, now, behind enemy lines, while she is home—for a value of it—and safe—for a value of it—with her file closed and bound tight with string. Marked _Scorpion_ , but shut.) She tries not to let that affect her. Behind her desk, her system is faultless, encrypted for her knowledge and hers alone. She is efficient, she is crucial, she is needed exactly as she is.

Her job, her real work, is done. She has earned her right to a paycheck, to stay out of the field except for the odd lunch date. The gun she keeps for protection. She is safe here.

 

 

“You’re needed,” Malcolm says to her, dallying beside her desk, and she looks up and reads his face. And, in spite of herself, his heartbeat. Steady. She rises, lets her fingers go to fix his cuff link.

“To what end?” She lets herself smile. “I’m retired, you’ll recall.”

A shadow crosses his face and she bites her tongue. Mortality isn’t something any of them like to talk about, never mind letting go of the work. To leave the office for good would be tantamount to walking directly into the grave. And his hair is so very grey.

“You’re too young,” he says, “for that sort of joke.”

His forefinger at the curve of her wrist, between blouse and bracelet. Gun callous to bare skin. An intimacy no one can make out at a distance, and so an intimacy she’ll forgive. “Then tell me how I’m meant to occupy my time.”

“Be my eyes and ears.”

“Malcolm,” she says, warning, and his eyes plead. Even if his words don’t.

“It’s an escort, Miss Ives.”

“If you wanted to take me out, you might just ask after-hours,” she teases, and for a moment a look of naked longing moves over his face. Longing for something other than her—she puts it far away from herself at once. It’s for himself, as much as anything: to be a man with a right to everything he touches, _wanted_. The agony of what he has been. Before she knew him.

He looks to himself endemically; a sickness of the work. The constant staring into one’s own emptiness, the core hollowed out to make room in the state. The wind’s loud in the empty heart after-hours, all the scotch in the world can’t drown it out. (His heart, loud enough that she can hear it through walls when he’s home. Hers in the hearing of it: a terrible thing.)

“You,” he says, his words heavy, “are not for me.”

Maybe not, not for work purposes. They never met on the job’s terms, after all: her as an asset, him as the ravening wolf in the field. He knew her as an ordinary girl, and she never once knew him as the Agent Murray of the cocktail stories. They are so simple to each other, she thinks, own heart thick in her throat. Such a bloody _relief_.

She tuts, a light countermand. “Then I’ve got to go out alone?”

“Far from it.” Steady fondness, steady breath. “Mr. Chandler wants a contact at tonight’s gala and put in a request for someone he knew.”

“That’s not all bad.”

“And I’ll be there.” His eyes are bright on hers, on honest terms at last. “Watch my back.”

“I hate to watch you go,” she demurs, just to see him laugh. And, yes, leave, with her unasked permission.

Over his shoulder: “I’ll see you at home.”

 

 

Work provides the dress. When she leaves the office, it’s hanging in her closet beside her coat, zipped neatly into its protective coverlet. She doesn’t look, not until she gets home. This too is part of the job, limited in its excitement, efficient in its practice. She can do her own hair, apply her lipstick without looking; she runs her tongue over her teeth as she unzips the hanger and tugs the straps off: perfect.

Still, with satin on her skin and her hair up it’s hard not to feel _something_ in the air. Call it anticipation, of only of her own ability to show off her competence. As a good agent, not merely as—herself. Inside the dress, she settles into her own skin. Such pleasant distraction is rare.

A hook at the top, an extra inch of the zipper still loose, right where she can’t get at it. Just at the small of her back, smooth, unscarred. (The needles were never big enough to scar.) She leaves her room, hoping for better vantage in the bathroom, not expecting assistance—“Malcolm,” she says, starting, as the unexpected steps into her path. “I didn’t know you’d be—if you wouldn’t mind?”

She turns, and for a beat he does not move. Then: “Of course.”

His hands, both of them, are warm on her bare back, one anchoring between the shoulder blades as the other fiddles with the hook. She can feel every whorl of his fingertip, as though an accident of desire. A misreading, of course; it’s only a wisdom she doesn’t know how to shut off. Of course, dear V in tech & science never understood why anyone would ever want _less_ knowledge, and the whole department thinks it’s prudent she be able to make such readings—that she would be able to recognize his fingerprint merely off its sensation on her skin. Useful if ever he left her.

Left MI6, she means, left country, left the work.

So she has to take the information in and store it. That it is her body that catalogues it is an inconvenience, a choice that was taken from her.

Still, his finger strokes up the curve of her spine and she sighs. That, she can’t help.

“Have mercy, Miss Ives,” he says softly.

“What do you mean?”

“On the room,” he says, forcing out a laugh. “You’ll have every eye in the place on you.”

“And is that bad?” she asks cautiously, turning. “I did think they were setting me up as an ornament.”

“Indeed. Sleight of hand.” His own moves back toward her skin, her bare shoulder, hovers there so near she can feel the heat, the trigger-pulling callouses not yet worn down from lack of use. (She can’t imagine, but the day must come. And Mina will laugh in her grave.) “So long as you don’t catch cold. Do wear a coat.”

“Yes.” She smiles wryly. “I’m quite prepared for the weather.”

The look in his eyes is heartfelt enough to terrify her. That’s one thing they can’t afford. Yet she supposes, neither of them have anywhere else to put it anymore. “Whatever the weather may bring.”

Everything in her wants to lean in; good old British intelligence tells her not to trust the impulse. She turns away, back to her room, to gather her lipstick and her thoughts in relative privacy. Swallows a glass of water, bitter with an extra drop of her medicine. Last of all, she places her gun carefully in her purse and is alone no longer—an old gift, this. She’s a better shot than she needs to be, than they need her to be, given the circumstances. Knows that from experience.

 

 

“Will you do this for us?” he’d asked with his hand on her face, always the physical intimacies, always the taking up space. Except for how tentative his hand had been on her cheek, the blunt tips of his fingers stroking the edges of her hair. And she would. She could not say no, but it was nice to be asked, all the same. Her mind, suddenly the brightest, keenest weapon in the room, suddenly sought-after. But that wasn’t why, he said: “You knew her,” he said.

Yes. She knew Mina well enough to recognize the pieces of her, the code on the papers and the ghosts she might leave in a room: her perfume, her shampoo, the drum of her restless fingers. The world was turned up like a radio dial, loud enough to hurt but clear enough for her to make out the lyrics.

They sent her to rooms Mina had been in. Places she might be. To chase that ghost, to fight whatever might be guarding them from the body.

Risk: high. No one had ever said otherwise.

“I will look after you,” Malcolm had said, almost as an afterthought. Except that she knew better, by then, to believe he dropped anything by accident. “In the field, I mean. You won’t get hurt.”

Again.

He’d meant the promise, but it hadn’t meant anything to her until he’d pressed the gun into her hand. How small it was, neat in her carryall, neat in her palm. Small enough that it startled her greatly, the first time she shot, the way the man fell.

The first mark, the first—Soviet, they said, but she wasn’t thinking of him as the Soviet Union’s but as _Mina’s_. In practice, a nobody, a deliberate one: bland-featured in a grey suit, pocket and wallet full of blank cards when they turned him out. He’d come at them out of nowhere in an alley, and then his breast was an inch from the muzzle, hardly a foot from the reach of her shaking hands. Nothing remarkable about his face, except the way his eyes had stared. Down on the dirty cobbles, colorless and bloodshot, staring up past her at the starless sky.

“It’s hard the first time,” Malcolm said to her, at home, when the shake in her hands wouldn’t go away.

“I don’t suppose you remember yours,” she said, her hands in the sink, the water running over their clean surface.

“Oh,” he said. “I do.”

She hadn’t asked. Hadn’t wanted to know. But when she turned back from the sink, he had been there wth a towel, with his own steady grasp, had folded her hands up in it until she couldn’t see them, could only feel the warmth of his own through the cloth.

 

 

She leaves the flat, now, thinking: You won’t have to kill anyone tonight. That’s not what they’re asking of you. Never again.

Not that, not now, not ever. Easy to believe it, even, when she spots Chandler in the foyer. Big shoulders hunched, hat in his hands, someone she’s sized up and doesn’t mind the measurements: an evening in his company is easy work. A smile blooms on her face. “Have you been waiting long?” she asks, taking his elbow, swiftly shedding her coat inside. He does not answer her. “What is it?”

“Well now,” he says with a swift clear of his throat, “just give me a moment to pick up my jaw. Best get used to that, Miss Ives. Mine won’t be the last you drop. Expect you’ll be making a trail of them.”

“You’ve never seen me cleaned up, have you?” She twinkles brightly at him, feeling free. The air is warm on her shoulders inside, lush with perfume and champagne. “Am I a suitable optical illusion?”

“You,” says Chandler with distressing commitment to sincerity, “are the real thing.”

She wants to like him less than she does. Then again, it makes the work pleasant. “What am I covering you for?”

“We’ve a connection with the sponsor. Running funds through the British Museum. He wants a meeting. The Soviets aren’t kind to—well, several things that he is.”

“Vampire?” she teases, not wanting to dwell on the potential cruelties on the other side of their work, on the other side of their world. Tonight, they skate on the surface. “Werewolf? _Domovoi?_ ”

“Miss Ives,” he says in some shock, “where’d you refine your Russian accent like that?”

“I pay attention at work.”

“You’ll have to tell me more about what you’ve been picking up.” He turns, with her on his arm, through a set of faceted-glass doors, gold-handled, through to the ballroom. “First, though, let me pick you up a drink.”

The crowd washes over her, close and compelling and seething with intelligence—but they do not force their information on hers; she hears them, their voices, their hearts, as though through a fog. Mr. Chandler’s voice in her ear is clear above all, and behind him, the tasteful thrum of the music. Harpstring above heartbeats. She smiles. She thinks, she can handle this. And the thought of a drink, unadulterated, unbuttered, appeals to her tremendously. Her limits will allow for one, perhaps two. She smiles, again, an expression that sticks.

Some nights, the work is all right.

“Stay here,” he says, mouth a little nearer her ear than it needs to be, and she nods, minding it a little less than she ought. Here’s pleasant, her elbow perched on one of the gold banisters running round the gaudy room, herself a half-gaudy part of it. Listening to the music, watching the crowd with her eyes alone. No more.

On the other side of the room, she sees Malcolm talking to a woman she doesn’t recognize from the back. Her smile stays alive on her face, waiting for him to catch her eye. As of now, he’s the only one in the room, she knows, except for Chandler—waylaid by the bar by a short round man with colored-orange hair, no secret operative _he_. She tucks her laughter into her cheek, turns her gaze back to Malcolm.

He does not look her way. Chandler does not return to her, not immediately, the man at the bar speaking passionately. She resists the impulse to listen, to reach out. Closing her eyes, she settles herself in her skin, in her lovely dress.

When she opens them, Malcolm is nearer, drawn forward by the woman with him. By her hand on his arm, the tilt of his head. Still unfamiliar, but of course she is. For a brief moment, Vanessa wonders if she’ll get to see the legacy in action. She never supposed Agent Murray would look so _lost_ in his work.

The woman smiles forward, toward Vanessa, all for Vanessa. In hearing’s range, she asks, “Is this your girl?”

Malcolm blinks and looks up, as though he’s seeing Vanessa for the first time. “Of course,” he says, still warm—warm enough. “Miss Ives. Has your escort left you here alone?”

“He’s by the bar. Back soon, I’m sure. He promised me a dance.”

“There’s a thought.” The woman turns that knife-keen grin up at Malcolm. “Would you promise me the same?”

“Of course, Mrs. Poole.”

“The drink first, then. A martini, I think. Twist of lemon, Lillet, shaken.”

“Not half bad,” Malcolm says, and then Vanessa is watching his shoulders as he goes. She can’t see Mr. Chandler from here any more. Can’t see anything around the woman, rude not to look her in the eye.

“He speaks highly of you,” she’s saying. “His—secretary, isn’t it? You must do very good work.”

“Mrs. Poole?” Vanessa asks, a polite bid for more information. She does not get it. Merely a nod, a satisfied glint in the stranger’s eye, a cat in the cream. “How do you know him?”

“I’ve been in the line of service nearly as long as he,” Mrs. Poole laughs lightly. “I remember the early days. Watching Malcolm Murray enter a room was a sight to behold. A gift so carefully bestowed upon every woman in the room.”

“You?” Vanessa asks, and Mrs. Poole shakes her head.

“Me? Never. I didn’t put myself in the line of fire, Miss—Ives, is it?”

_You know,_ Vanessa resists saying, has to bite the tip of her tongue. But the woman does know. She doesn’t have to read beneath her skin, doesn’t have to delve into her thoughts, to know that.

For a brief, risky, angry moment, she wishes she hadn’t added the third drop. That she was thinking clearly, with all her senses. But no. It wouldn’t be worth it. Not for this, this petty woman’s-war in the ballroom. Mrs. Poole standing too close, in unseasonal but expensive velvet the color of an elegant eggplant, diamonds in her ears. Proprietary gleam in her eye even brighter. The scent of orchid, one Vanessa favors, headache-strong and wafting from her nape and wrists. This is enough intelligence, this is all that she needs to know.

Except one more thing. “What’s brought you here tonight, then?” she asks, still polite. “If not the line of fire—”

“Not the line but the wall, Miss Ives. There’s been a departmental merger, haven’t you heard? Your Agent Murray is my Agent Murray now.”

Vanessa blinks. “Where’s Sembene?”

“Retirement,” says Mrs. Poole delicately, “will come to us all in the end. Certainly your Mr. Sembene deserves it more than most. The things he’s had to do.” She lets herself shudder beneath the conspicuous warmth of her velvet. “That all his men have had to do. Let him rest.”

“And if his men are resting—”

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Poole presses her lips together. “I don’t like the way his office has been delegating business one bit. Too many good men going to waste. Don’t you agree, Mr. Murray?”

His laugh comes from nowhere, falsely hearty at Vanessa’s shoulder. “Quite right. As I’ve long said.”

“You’re not dead yet,” says Mrs. Poole.

Two champagne goblets filled with gin and lemon peel sweat into Malcolm’s hands. He makes a surprisingly patient waiter, and so shockingly quiet on his feet. She hadn’t heard a moment of his approach. So much for command of the room, for _a sight to behold, a gift to the women of the room_ —Mrs. Poole, murmuring her thanks aloud, taking a glass, laughs ironically in the back of Vanessa’s thoughts, and she herself has to bite her own tongue. Her mouth tastes sour, parched. Malcolm is looking at Mrs. Poole as though there’s no one else in the room, no other greater work to do. Perhaps there isn’t. _Good work._ _His secretary_.

As if compelled by the echo of her own voice in Vanessa’s head, Mrs. Poole reaches out. With her one free hand, the one not holding a glass, she takes Vanessa’s forearm. “I might have said the same to you, Miss Ives.”

“I’m not dead?” Vanessa asks tartly, and Mrs. Poole laughs.

“That I won’t let you squander your skills behind a desk.” Her hand squeezes, nails like claws beneath satin gloves, honed sharp. “You are fearfully and wonderfully made.”

The blood is gone from Vanessa’s face, heavy in her limbs. Her hands are numb, face pale, Mr. Chandler gone—she leans in toward Malcolm, _are you hearing this?_ in her eyes, but he keeps his smile on, his bluff expression, his back up. “Did you see Mr. Chandler at the bar?” she asks, hating the listening nearness of Mrs. Poole, and Malcolm shakes his head.

“Chandler? No.”

“Come along,” Mrs. Poole says, steering him back. “We’ve still so much to talk about.”

Canary feathers on her lips, canary diamonds at her ears, Malcolm’s gaze fixed on her like another treasure for her to wear. The only woman worth looking at in the room. Of course Agent Murray would ferret her out. The legacy, not dead yet, that’s plain, there he is. The version of him she’d never met.

Vanessa shakes her head, presses a finger to her temple, vision fuzzing at the edges. The extra dose was a mistake, perhaps. A blink, and she can look away, can search over the dance floor. Mr. Chandler, head and shoulders high in the whirling crowd, a woman in his arms. Another brunette, pretty, dark curls tumbling down her back, half-Grecian dress. He had said his connection was with the museum—

He turns, turns the woman, who looks square into Vanessa’s eyes.

_You are fearfully and wonderfully made._

Mrs. Poole’s words, but the tone’s all wrong. Mrs. Poole’s laugh—no, it’s not. Another, sharper, brighter. Younger.

_Hello, Miss Ives. Nice to get a look at you. It’s not a bad look, either._

A mistake, the dose, the whirl in her head, the voice like a knife at the fore of her skull. She didn’t ask for this. Didn’t look, didn’t pry. But there it is. Borne into her head with all the delicacy of a crowbar, forcing her open to someone else. Someone new.

_You’re not bad,_ the voice says. _But I’m better._

This is the last thing she hears.

 

 

She awakens in the back of a cab, two coats over her shoulders. “You went down shivering,” says Mr. Chandler. “Murray said to send you home. You all right now?”

“I’m—” Her tongue is dry. The answer is a strong _no_. Several. She swallows each one of them. “Better now, of course. What in the world happened there?”

The neat answer would be, _something in her drink_. But she got there first. She didn’t get to drink at the party; she has only herself to blame.

But the voice, the voice was new.

“Who was the girl?” she asks and his face goes hard.

“She small-talked me onto the dance floor like she wanted to open me up and rummage around in the contents. Not light stuff, even if it was over a champagne glass.” He makes a sound of terse disapproval, a hard-whuffed breath through his nose. “I don’t mind working with Lyle. Defectors I understand, and I’ve got the measure of him. But she’s apparently one of yours and I don’t mind saying, Miss Ives, I didn’t trust her further than I could’ve thrown her.”

Vanessa snorts, throat too dry to laugh. “Mine? No.”

“Your people.”

“I don’t know who my people are, Mr. Chandler,” she says, weary, Mrs. Poole’s voice still weighing in her head. When he moves just-so at her side, she accepts his tacit invitation to put her head on his shoulder.

“Now,” he says, “that ain’t true. I’m on your side.”

“You’re not,” she says dryly into the fabric of his coat, “in my office.”

Malcolm would not have sent her home alone; she thinks, uncharitably: he owes her better than this. And knows it.

“You should ask him about your contact,” she says. “Field Agent Murray, I mean. He knows a thing or two about untrustworthy women. That’s notoriously his line of work.”

“Not for some years,” Mr. Chandler says with a laugh that she doesn’t echo. “That’s old-school stuff.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

_He’s not dead yet,_ she doesn’t say. _Yet, yet._

 

 

She awakens alone. (Not this again, she thinks, but shakes it off.)

It’s no different to most days. No work on a Saturday, so she makes herself tea—unadulterated, if she’s only in her own company, her head almost alive with pain. Aspirin will do. Too much, last night. Mistake. She takes to the post office, sunglasses on, finds a telegram waiting: THANKS, it says. DRINKS FOR YOUR TROUBLE MISS IVES AT SIX IF YOU PLEASE -  ETHAN

She knows Mr. Chandler’s first name from contact sheets; nevertheless, it startles her here. Less conspicuous, she supposes, in print. There’s an address, a bar, amidst the hurried words. Somewhere to go.

Six finds her blinking behind her sunglasses into the still-high summer sun, her headache not all the way gone. The café’s an outdoor one, she notes with mixed unease, a little Italianate place with Campari posters peeling on the walls. Women in red, their dresses licking up and catching on fire. She feels too near to hell as it is.

Then the voice. Spiking back into her head, right in the wound it had already made: _Hello, Miss Ives_.

Careful not to react, Vanessa rubs her hand lightly over her forehead and looks around.

Not Mr. Chandler, sitting at the table by the doorway with two drinks on the table. The brunette, the pretty one, the staring one. The one he didn’t trust.

_You’ve got it,_ says the voice delightedly, as the girl grins with all her teeth. _Come on. Come where we can talk._

_Run_ , she tries to think, her own voice muted, but her memories so full. She knows better, she has to. Has to run while she still can.

She’s lived this scene before.

 

_Here came Mina, on the wind. The shampoo was different—of course. They wouldn’t have the same on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But beneath that, breathing, waiting, the same golden girl. Brilliant and watchful, drumming her fingertips on the table in a little outdoor café in Austria._

_With Vanessa’s eyes closed, she could see her so clearly. When she’d opened them, there she was._

_She had approached, and Mina hadn’t tried to run. Her smile had been very knowing and very sad. “I knew you’d come.”_

 

Vanessa sits down. There are too many people here for violence, she thinks. They’re not plants here. Probably not. Not _theirs_ , in any case, not MI6’s. The thought fails to reassure her.

“Oh,” the girl says, uncrossing her legs, “come on. Our side didn’t set this up either. I just wanted to talk.”

“Get out,” Vanessa says through her teeth, “of my head.”

“Then close it up.” As though making a point, she re-crosses her legs. “Can’t exactly complain when an open wound catches infection, when an open window catches viewers. You’ve caught me.” She raises her hands, wiggles her fingers. “ _Ooh_. And what’ll you do with me now?”

“What do you want with Mr. Chandler?” Vanessa asks coldly, and the girl laughs.

“If I wanted Mr. Chandler, I’d’ve bought a drink for Mr. Chandler. He’s not the project. You are.”

Vanessa sits very still, her back up straight and rigid against the back of the chair, as the girl leans in. “You can’t have thought you were the only one, did you? You can’t, all this time, have imagined you were alone.”

 

_ “I don’t want to do this,” Mina said, and Vanessa heard the click before she felt the knife—her hearing a second ahead of Mina’s motions, her body nevertheless behind. The blade pressed cold under her skirt, and she heard her stocking beginning to run against the edge. Mina’s instincts unfailing in their precision, her focus pure as ever.  _

_ For all that, Vanessa could not get into her head.  _

_ When Mina grinned, joyless, Vanessa saw she had bitten her lip until it bled. “They told me what they’re doing in MI6,” she said with blood on her teeth. “I’m sorry they did it to you. But they prepare us, you know.” The blade against Vanessa’s artery, the pulse of blood under her skin so vivid it might as well have been her heart. “For your kind.” Her gaze over Vanessa’s shoulder, chilling.  _

_ “And  _ you _ —you’ll never get in ever again. Mother taught me better,” she said—a peculiar thing to say, when Gladys Murray had been dead for years. But she turned back to Vanessa, who could only focus on herself. The knife, her heartbeat alive in her artery, the last second where Mina looked sad. _

_ “Oh, Vanessa,” she’d said, so plaintive. Such an odd couple with the knife under the table, with the look on her face so clearly and suddenly cold. “I never dreamed you’d work with  _ him _.” _

 

“I know I’m not alone,” she says. Though she is tonight. And nearly last night. Though there’s no gun in her purse now and no one waiting around the corner. “As do you. You picked the right name.”

“I mean, he’s charming, isn’t he?” The girl has an American accent when she speaks out loud, though one that shifts around the edges. Maine. It wants to be Maine. Wants sea-salt and fine breeding. It doesn’t sound like that when she’s in Vanessa’s head. Pure as the Queen’s, when she’s dancing on nails in Vanessa’s skull. “But he’s not a project. The Americans haven’t put their work into their people. They think they can beat us by buying bigger guns.”

“You’re Soviet,” says Vanessa flatly, and the girl holds up a fingertip.

“Not so loud! You’re not even right.”

“Who are you, then?”  


“Hecate,” the girl says smugly. “Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone.”

“You are not,” Vanessa replies, and she smiles again with little white cat teeth.

“What else are you gong to call me?”

“I can think of some things to call you,” she says, and Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone throws back her head and laughs, the way Vanessa thought girls only did in stories. She watches the brown curls go tossing, the long line of the girl’s throat. Hecate. Aphrodite. Witchcraft, honeypot, legacy. Fine.

“Have a drink,” says the so-called, and Vanessa’s lip curls.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Hecate rolls her eyes. “Okay,” she says and reaches forward to take a swift sip from Vanessa’s glass, then from her own. “See?”

_There’d be no point in killing you,_ she says in Vanessa’s head, _and it would be so much trouble killing you in public._

Her voice is a pinpoint agony. Vanessa clenches her teeth. “Stop that. Or I won’t talk.”

“You don’t have to talk. I can listen either way. I can _look,_ can’t I?”

And she is looking—

 

_Malcolm’s gun had a silencer, but the whine of the bullet buzzed through every one of Vanessa’s senses. A mosquito in her ear. The air fast on her cheek. The jolt of silver in the air. The red between Mina’s eyes._

_“I told you,” he said, hands steady, before the police arrived to take the body. “I would never let her hurt you.”_

 

“Get out,” Vanessa hisses, and Hecate presses her finger to her lips, hard enough for Vanessa to taste. Perfume, vodka, gunpowder. Or maybe she’s remembering that one.

“He’s not here now. Nobody is. Just you and me. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

 

_“I will never work again.”_

_“You’ll never have to. We’ll keep you safe.”_

_“I don’t care about MI6—”_

_“I’ll,” he’d amended. Black leather gloves, cool from the Austrian snow, wiping tears off her face before they could freeze there. “I’ll keep you safe.”_

 

“He’s the one you want,” she says, hating herself for it. It’s not giving him up, not if she’s around to tell him what’s gone wrong. To get ahead before the bullets start flying. “What am I to any of you?”

Hecate leans back with a roll of her eyes.“He’s Mother’s bait,” she says, flicking her fingers at something errant in the air. All ostentatious disdain. “A fine trophy—the old hunter’d know something about _that_ —but what a boring conquest, the old white elephant to Mr. Chandler’s hunting dog. Maybe he’ll die in an amusing way, if she sets the right scene, she’s good at that—but you’re the one who’s built for a long life. I should know.” She crosses her arms. Pushes up her bosom against the table, in her summer-white blouse. Vanessa wonders why she’s setting out to work on _her_. “I’m your kind.”

“You are not,” Vanessa begins, and feels Hecate’s presence in her head like a thumb on a bruise.

 

_He’d kissed her in the snow._

_In the hotel, then, in the hotel bedroom, she’d kissed him—_

 

“Get out.”

 

_She’d felt Mina’s blood on her hands, her clothes, like a physical thing, for all she couldn’t see the red. Even sitting in the shower, it hadn’t come off. Water on her clothes, but the blood had remained._

_“You didn’t do anything to her,” said Malcolm, sitting beside her under the fall of water, still in his coat,“that she didn’t do to herself. She was dead the minute she left the country.” His voice hard: “We both lost her.”_

_A lie, made of equal parts kindness and cruelty. He had peeled off his gloves and taken her hand, and the kindness had outweighed the cruelty. He had put his lips to her fingers and she had felt the scales shift within her. And despite all, despite the litany of sins, the cost of their travels added up in bodies stacked in their wake, she had felt a violent surge of precise gratitude in that moment. She had flushed, despite the cold water, and knew: they had not taken this from her after all._

 

“Back,” she hisses, no longer certain if the language that comes out of her mouth is in English. Nevertheless, it works. Like tearing a Band-Aid, but it works. Hecate, on the other side of the table, flinches, then giggles a bit.

“You’re right,” she says, “I’m better. But that’s not your fault. You’ve plenty of room for improvement.” She exhales happily, looking Vanessa square in the eye. “I’m so glad you didn’t drink your knockout drops before coming out today. You know, I can do a whole building from across the road, if I’m concentrating—do you know how many hotels face your precious MI6 headquarters, by the way?—but you’ve got enough to hold my attention all on your own. Come with me.” Her foot between Vanessa’s. No knife in her hand when she presses it, emphatically, to Vanessa’s thigh. “Stop moldering alongside the old guard. Come with me.”

Vanessa steels herself, from the skin on down. Against the onrush of—information, that’s all it ever is. Against the distractions of temperature and fingerprints, the rise and fall of breath, the cold steeled iron locking Hecate’s thoughts out of reach. The problem of translation (what she can catch thrums in Slavic on the other side, a third accent. Soviet after all. Or bigger. Evil beyond Curtain edges, beyond any border at all).

She makes herself listen with ears alone. To think in terms of what she’s heard. Words, not senses, will guide her. Her senses will lie. Hecate’s hand will lie.

Hecate’s hand, in the silence, slides back up from Vanessa’s thigh. She tilts her head to gauge the reaction: this, Vanessa is good at withholding. This, she learned early on. At length, Hecate raises her drinking glass to Vanessa, toasts her and lets the edge of the glass linger on her lips as she drinks, her eyes alive and bright over the rim. Watching, waiting.

Vanessa says, very calmly, “Do you love your Mother?”

_There’s_ the crack in the wall.

Hecate spits vodka and tonic, undignified, into her glass and starts laughing. The sound of her laugh is unstable, a chaotic near-ugly sound from a beautiful girl, and Vanessa feels the slight burn in her throat and nose, and sees the face that stares out of Hecate’s thoughts.

One she recognizes.

She pushes back her chair and takes off. Behind her, Hecate calls out, “You can tell her so!”

 

 

By the time she reaches the office, she is breathless. Up the stairs, to the doorway—with the door cracked open already. She peers inside.

“Malcolm?” she asks, not expecting a yes. Nor does she receive one. Her desk is empty, and the surrounding offices dark. Only one door is open; she presses on.

Sembene stands behind his desk, his briefcase open. “Ah,” he says, and he has a smile for her that breaks her heart. “What brings you into the office on a Sunday, Miss Ives?”

“I heard there’s been changes from up top,” she says in a marvelously steady voice. “Surely that’s not true.”

“I’m afraid so.” He shuts his briefcase with a neat click. “Never supposed I’d be one for early retirement, but I can’t pass up—”

“She’s not ours,” she blurts out. “That Mrs. Poole.”

His hands, square and well-manicured on the shining black leather, go very still.

“What do you know?”

“Do you trust me?” she asks, and the steadiness gives way, and with it, her legs. The inside of her head pulses, agonized, still raw from Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone treading through. By the grace of God, she manages to fall, if not gracefully, into one of the chairs facing his desk, a moment before he can reach her. Her head in her hands—God help her, everything is an agony. All of her hurts, body and soul, as it hasn’t hurt since Mina. Blood on the Austrian snow, sun lancing into newly sharp eyes. She’s raw all over again, untried.

Sembene’s two hands take on of her own. “I trust you with all we have,” he says, his solemn voice echoing somewhere far above her. “You’ve more than proven what you’re willing to give.”

“Then please,” she says. “Trust me and fight.”

“Alas, Miss Ives.” His laugh comes low and sad and clever, cleverer than her with things she’s never had to learn about the world. “You think the on-highs aren’t pleased to have someone take my place?”

She looks up, into his scarred face, his clear eyes. Kind eyes, that don’t match his record.

“I’ve had to be twice as cruel to get half as much done,” he says. “Perhaps my replacement won’t need—”

“It can’t be her,” she says. “She’ll see him dead. Her girl told me as much.”

Slowly, he nods. “I’ll make them wait.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Oh, M., thank you, thank you.”

 

 

She calls Mr. Chandler from his desk.

“Can you make a distraction?” she asks.“Find out where the girl works and—”

“Bull in a china shop,” he cuts in, wry.“Dog with a bone. Got it.”

 

 

That’s head and hands set to work.

Now for the heart.

 

 

A cab takes her to the Savoy, after only a brief stop at home to pick up her bag and fill it with what she needs. The suite number’s written on the key; the key is atop the fridge. Left behind, in her trust.

Malcolm’s suite smells of orchid, the scent he’d at one point bought for her that she last smelled on Mrs. Poole’s elegant wrists. For a brief, horrified minute, she thinks that she’s—well, not wrong, but small-hearted. Wrong about Malcolm, in any case. Agent Murray, that she’s never known him at all, never been safe, never had anything to claim.

That’d be her done with MI6, she thinks. Sembene mightn’t be the only one retiring early. She could transfer, she supposes the CIA’d have her on Mr. Chandler’s recommendation. Or she might disappear. What might she do with a new life, untethered to any of them?

The thought hollows her out. She pushes through the door, her bag heavy on her wrist. And she’s right. She was right all along.

Agent Murray is in the bedroom, yes, with his tie off and his collar loose, but at the table. Drinks on the table. Mrs. Poole sitting straight-backed on the bed, fully and expensively dressed, a briefcase at her side. She turns. There is not enough surprise on her face.

“Your daughter loves you, Mrs. Poole,” Vanessa says bitterly. “I suggest you take her home.”

“My—” Mrs. Poole raises her brows incrementally. “Given me up, has she?”

Malcolm turns toward her, the sharpness behind his eyes gone dull. “Ah, Vanessa,” he says, with a gesture of confused magnanimity. “What brings you here?”

Mrs. Poole shushes him softly, without looking. And he shushes. Fully compliant, both hands still and empty on the table. Under his broad-spread fingers, his record fans out, file wide open with nothing hidden, nothing redacted. A martini glass making a wet ring over the Murray mission. DIABLO - CLOSED. C/REF VERBIS PROJECT - NEED TO KNOW. Vanessa can hardly speak.

“Would you like the rest of his drink?” Mrs. Poole asks. “What’s his is yours, after all.”

Vanessa opens her mouth. Before she can reply—something stinging, something hateful—she feels Mrs. Poole crawling in behind her eyes.

_Ah_ , says Mrs. Poole in her head. _So she didn’t give me up. Only gave herself away. I thought I trained her better, but I couldn’t make her care for secrecy, not if she didn’t want to._

“What do you care for secrecy?” Vanessa asks, loudly, over the drum in her temples, the red behind her eyes. “You’re here with MI6’s best agent, in his rooms, with his papers. And you’ve—drugged him?” she tests.

Mrs. Poole tuts. “You know I don’t have to.”

“Vanessa,” Malcolm says, no more than mildly bemused, “I can hear you.”

“She knows.” Mrs. Poole shrugs elegantly, reaches into the briefcase to turn a dial, and the soft pressure inside Vanessa’s head turns screw-tight. She gasps, and Mrs. Poole stands, and she doesn’t need devices to do damage. Already she can feel her sinking deep into her thoughts, cutting through pain with more pain.

There is a painless way to do this, she knows. _Clumsy,_ she thinks—offers—and Mrs. Poole uncrossing her legs, like Hecate, treads through her thoughts confidently in stiletto heels. Also like Hecate. _Everything she learned, she learned from you. If she’s a bad agent—_

Mrs. Poole bats Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone from Vanessa’s thoughts like she’s swatting a fly. _She’s not the bad daughter that interests me at present._

Vanessa, in her own head. Vanessa, at the table with Mina. Malcolm’s hand cool-gloved and hard on her shoulder, hard as if he’s squeezing the trigger. In the room, Malcolm sitting docilely, a puppet of himself. In the room, Mrs. Poole’s cheeks flushing with high satisfaction, and her long shapely nails clench against the sheets at her sides.

“Oh,” she breathes, “that’s where she went. Oh,” and she smiles, “that’s why you matter. You got it from her.”

Mina’s lips on Vanessa’s lips. She sees what Mrs. Poole sees, as though she’d drunk the power from Mina like a fount. Washed her hands with Mina’s blood to make them stronger. She knows better, she knows much better, but the knowledge sinks deep and irretrievable within her, shying away from the display. The awful light of Mrs. Poole’s eyes.

She hadn’t pulled the gun, she thinks, Malcolm had.

Then Mrs. Poole is gone from her head, the absence as lurchingly painful as the present. She is standing, moving lightly toward the table, she is taking a martini glass in hand and whispering something soft in Malcolm’s ear. He drinks from his own with a nod, listening with easy focus as though they are the only two in the room.

And he stands, then, and his world makes room for Vanessa again. His eyes lock on hers, the expression in them brand new and deeply profane: he looks, at once, happier than she’s ever seen him. She takes a step back.

“Mina,” he says, drawing forward, and he is faster than her. His arms around her, stronger than her. His lips on the part of her hair. Her body against his, so used to giving in.

“Agent Murray,” she says softly, voice muffled against his lapel. “It’s me.”

“Mina,” he murmurs, his hands cupping her face, his eyes clear and unseeing. “Mina, my Mina—”

All at once, his hands are around her throat.

“What,” he asks, eyes ice-clear on hers, “have you done with Miss Ives?”

She cannot speak, the air that won’t meet her lungs drying on the surface of her lips.  Here, at last, is the man she’s never met. The killer, infamous. (The killer of women, the killer of his own daughter. Merciless, soulless, loveless—and her knowing differently is worth nothing, now, not with his thumbs pressed against her windpipe.)

Behind him, Mrs. Poole is laughing.

“How sordid,” she says, victoriously aloud. “This is how it ends?”

The thoughts she’s torn through still flutter at the fore of Vanessa’s consciousness, tattered at the edges. Mina, she thinks, as Malcolm tightens his grip.

Fool her. Mrs. Poole hadn’t pushed hard enough.

As her vision smudges black at the edges, she offers up one memory she knows they share. Pushes it forward, privately encoded, into the fore of Malcolm’s thoughts. This, as much as anything, she has Mina to thank for.

She feels his hands shake, where they rest against her throat.

“It’s me,” she says, eyes stinging, throat stinging, and sees the flicker of lucidity. Easy thing to dispel a false vision: you just have to change the light. What little light there is in the room. “It’s a trick. It’s me.”

She catches his wrists and leans in. Brings the memory back to life: Malcolm’s lips where his daughter’s had been.

In the room. In Austria. And the brief, awful victory, both times, of knowing the chemicals hadn’t burnt that out of her after all, that they had only brought her to brighter light.

MI6 hadn’t cared if she was degenerate so long as she was _theirs_. And for at least a night, she hadn’t cared either.

Now her thoughts cut into his like a knife, her lips desperate on his, and he blinks—“Vanessa?” he asks, and she thinks, you see, Mrs. Poole, it doesn’t have to hurt. It doesn’t have to be cruel. Even as his eyes, newly lucid, close, and his weight falls against hers. To the floor. For a big man, he crumples almost delicately.

_You don’t have to hurt them,_ she thinks, _to fell them_. Men, nations. If you don’t understand the human heart, you’ll never be able to find your way through the heart of a country.

Her breath is loud, ragged in the air, an unprivate thing.

“It always hurts,” Mrs. Poole says aloud. “You see, it strains the mind, unless you are very, very strong.”

A vein beats in her temple. Vanessa watches it, taking its time. “This is what you’re after?” she manages, hoarse and flushed and hateful. “Blackmail?”

“No,” says Mrs. Poole simply. “Understanding. Do you think they’d be shocked if they knew, or do you think they’d just be glad it was a man?”

The words sting like a slap, harder for being spoken aloud. She doesn’t know whether she owes the nausea she feels to the press behind her skull or to three years’ worth of guilt, the boil suddenly lanced and newly ugly.

“Why is this important—the office secretary’s private life?” She swallows, hating herself for it. How small it makes her sound. Better that than large enough to destroy countries. “Why does the Soviet Union care?” she asks, guessing again, and Mrs. Poole shakes her head again.

“They’ve taught you to think so small, but you have so much potential. _If you don’t understand the human heart, you’ll never be able to find your way through the heart of a country_ ,” she mimics, and Vanessa freezes. “You have the right instincts, certainly. You don’t disappoint. My master wanted to know what happened to his asset, but I wanted to know the state of MI6’s best weapons. A cold gun and a hot secret.” She tilts her head, evaluating with her teeth sunk into the edge of her lip. Something in her thoughts that needs to be balanced with live, realized pain. “I knew a woman like you, you know. In all ways like you. And she had the same weakness.”

Vanessa lifts her chin. Notes the shade of wrongness in her voice—familiarly wrong. Everything Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone knew was learned here, and she can trace the habits backward. Here again, she thinks again, is the crack in the wall.

“But you loved her,” Vanessa says aloud and watches Mrs. Poole’s lips curl into a snarl.

She pushes.

The face rises up in Mrs. Poole’s thoughts before she can pull back. (She swears she recognizes it— _her_ —but puts that aside, tucking it into her purse for later. It might cause a greater wound than the gun.) Maybe, Vanessa thinks, feeling cruel and cold as Mrs. Poole’s thoughts scream at her in several languages, few of which she can understand, maybe she can’t.

A name and a face. That’s all she really needs.

“Mina’s not the defector you were after all along,” she says.

“Mina was loyal,” Mrs. Poole spits, and Vanessa shakes her head.

“To your side, Evelyn. _Eva_. Mother.”

It’s Mrs. Poole’s turn to flinch.

“Whomever you are.”

The woman calling herself Mrs. Poole, born Eva, several names to the wind, looks at her with eyes so bloodshot they’ve ringed the irises with bright, demonic red. “You’re never getting her back,” Vanessa says and pushes one last time. _None of them. Not your woman, not Mina, and not me._

_Whatever you are, whomever you were, no one else is going to die for your vendettas. Not for your mistakes._

Still, she thinks, it doesn’t have to hurt. Correction: it doesn’t have to hurt _them_. She digs her nails into her own hand and pushes, pushes, delicate and focused.

They say that men trained for field work, the agents with a killing license, they say they’re taught how to kill an enemy with a single press of a finger. A thumb on a nerve, placed just so. Not her training, of course. But the philosophy stands. She finds the lone raw nerve in Evelyn’s consciousness, the single trembling faultline between the chaos and the calm, and she presses.

Whomever she was, Eva now-Poole might have loved her.

With no particular joy, Vanessa watches Mrs. Poole crumple. Her head slams into one of the martini glasses; gin and olive juice spills onto the papers of Malcolm’s history in the field. I should clean those up, Vanessa thinks, sinking to her own knees. Three bodies in the room, but she’s still as good as alone.

She presses her face into her hands.

Some time later—minutes, hours, Malcolm a silent weight on her feet—he door opens with an unceremonious slam. Hecate, cheeks flushed, panting, her hair unraveling from its bun around her shoulders, flings it shut behind her. “What’ve you done with Mother?”

Everything incriminating in the room is illegible now. Vanessa lifts her head, unconcerned with Hecate treading through the mess. She doesn’t need to bring her in, necessarily. MI6 would trust her testimony. Her gun weighs in her purse, and she slides it behind her back, hiding her hands along the clasp. They’d trust her action, too.

At her feet, Malcolm stirs slightly, a moan muffling itself against her shoe and the carpet.

“Take her and do what you want with her,” she says. “But be gone by the morning—really gone. Or I’ll come back.”

Hecate’s eyes light up. “Do you promise?”

The gun is in her hands; she clicks the safety off. “Enough,” she says, and Hecate freezes, though she can feel her frisson of excitement from across the room. This isn’t a joke, she thinks, wearily, as loud as she can, hoping Hecate will pick it up. “Let me go. And I’ll take _your_ promise, thanks. I’ll give you an hour.”

“All right!” Hecate puts her hands up and clasps them together over her head, sliding them idly behind her hair. It’s all still a joke to her. Vanessa almost envies.

She feels Hecate tap-tap-tapping on the fore of her thoughts, feels the invitation of her own weakness, her ragged edges. Her thoughts like a swinging-open door, unlocked and ready for perusal.

Hecate frowns. “That’s no fun,” she says—aloud. “It’ll be more fun next time. I don’t have to look to know you won’t want blood on your hands. Well,” she says cheerfully, making her way to the edge of the bed, “that’s your decision. Grow up a bit and come find me.” With the sharp toe of one of her pumps, she kicks Mrs. Poole’s limp leg, hard, seeming riveted at its undisturbed stillness. “Or,” she says, eyes on Vanessa, “you can stay.”

Mrs. Poole’s breath is shallow and even, the scent of orchid still strong in the room. No death. Nothing to blame her for. Vanessa should be grateful—shouldn’t she.

She reaches down, weaves her fingers through Malcolm’s. Relief comes like rain when his grip tightens on hers. Blinking, he starts to ask, “Where—”

“Can you stand?” she interrupts.

He can.

It’s neither an ethical decision, nor a businesslike one, but she leaves Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone alone to her devices. Time to go home.

 

 

Back at the flat, she calls Mr. Chandler. Malcolm can stand alone, and she has little to say to him, nor he to her. Beneath her collar, she thinks she can feel bruises forming, the thin chain of her lavaliere cold and chafing beneath her blouse, but they’ll heal within the day and her voice on the phone is strong and clear, practical.

Their conversation is short. He’s got to go check on the hotel, after all—off to catch Hecate’s scent and follow her trail. He’ll call her from the suite. It’s a promise.

Left alone, the phone back on the hook, she lies on the couch and listens to the shower running, tugging idly at the cross on her necklace. Just enough that it hurts a little; just enough that it keeps her sharp. In absence of a rosary, she can pray by counting her bruises. In the background of her thoughts, the water runs and runs until she loses track of time. Long enough that she can lose track, lose focus of the minutes, stop thinking anything at all. Until—the first thought that interrupts her hard-won ragged quiet—it occurs to her that this is too long for either of them to be left alone. He never wastes time like this.

Upstairs, the door’s been left open. She leans in. At the threshold of the shower, Malcolm stands with his suit still on, the shower soaking through the expensive tailoring, the still-tight tie. Eyes on the blank wall tile ahead. She can feel him shivering from across the room, can make out his heartbeat warring with his decreasing physical temperature. He doesn’t turn when she knocks lightly on the door frame.

Nor does he flinch when she stands behind him, when she lets her hand light on the damp dense fabric between his shoulder blades.

She reaches out— _inward_ —and finds his mind free of trouble. No new information. That’s the trouble, isn’t it: Mrs. Poole hadn’t had to invent anything.

The effort hurts her head, and more to the point, the mind is a private thing. This is a cruel weapon to use. Cruel to him, cruel to her, cruel on the part of the state.

“They should not ask these things of us,” she says aloud, closing the space she’d left open in his thoughts behind her. She can’t lock it. That’s on him. He’s never had trouble locking himself away before.

He says, voice quite mild, “It’s my duty.”

She lets her face rest between his shoulder blades, damp wool in her nose, careless of the wet. “I’m sorry,” he says, rough now, and she shakes her head.

The bruises will heal.

“You couldn’t do anything about it,” she says, and he reaches behind him, takes her hands in his own wet ones.

Mrs. Poole hadn’t had to invent anything. That was the trouble.

“I should retire,” he says ruefully. “If you’re in danger in spite of me—”

_ Because _ _of_.

Then again, that has always been true. She has never been safe in her life. Now she is, if nothing else, powerful. Powerful enough that she could offer him protection from her. Though she doesn’t think he’d appreciate it.

“That’s my job to worry about now,” she settles on saying.

His breath is beginning to regulate. His heartbeat along with it. Even after all this, she still cares.

He turns to face her, hand in hers slippery but still keeping its grip. She brings it up to her mouth, kisses the palm. There. “You’re forgiven,” she says.

He coughs out a laugh and shifts his shoulder to turn off the water behind him. The silence of the room weighs heavily on them, two fools in wet clothes. No more, no less, no better, at least now that it’s the weekend and both of their files are compromised—what questionable assets they make. “You’re such a little Catholic,” he laughs, but she keeps his hand in hers.

“In any case, don’t bother Sembene with the details of your retirement on a Sunday,” she says, practical again. She _is_ a valued asset, whether or not in the field. “He’s got a wretched lot to take care of. I wouldn’t do it this week at all, I expect he’ll be fielding several very apologetic phone calls. We ought to get him a cake,” she muses. “He likes buttercream, as I recall.”

Her hands go to Malcolm’s tie, worrying the wet knot loose. “Oh,” she says, “speaking of rewards I’ve invited Mr. Chandler to dinner.”

“Has he done something worth a reward?” Malcolm asks with forced ease, and her hands slip for just a moment. He missed so much, she thought. Or maybe he simply wasn’t paying attention.

“He’s pleasant company,” she says, chiding lightly, at last. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

Malcolm, watching her, nods. A silent compact: nothing is beyond their ability to live through. “Quite.”

There. Tie unworked, his hands slip fluidly into the pace she started, tugging the jacket off and starting on his buttons. As though nothing had been amiss. As though nothing had gone wrong for three years. Well, that means he can take care of himself—and she should look to her own well-being. She turns to go.

“I don’t deserve you,” Malcolm says abruptly behind her.

She breathes into it, then out, stock-still where she stands.

“None of us do.”

“We all deserve to die, I suppose.” When she turns around, her smile is bright and forced. “For our country, isn’t that right? And yet that doesn’t mean we have to go leaping into the jaws of defeat right away. I wouldn’t mind living a little longer,” she says. “And I wouldn’t mind if you were there alongside. Try to remember that.”

He salutes, old-soldier training beneath the fieldwork, layered in with the veneer of charm. “I’ll try.”

What more can any of them do, she thinks, than try. To live from day to day, to not get killed, to love each other, maybe, whether or not they deserve it.

 

 

Three years in this job and her nine-to-five world is a known quandary, lived-in: Vanessa goes to work with a headache but takes her tea in the kitchen unadulterated. Then, on her break, she takes to the stairs. She knows each floor in this division is organized superficially in the same way, so long as you don’t push the wrong button or kick the wrong panel on the floor. Tech and science is no different, for all that V is always buried deep in his work, in secret, in chambers large enough to hide cars or bombs or bodies.

Even so, the division has a secretary at the front desk. She keeps typing, her sturdy knotted fingers moving with a quick life of their own, as Vanessa comes to stand in front of her, even as she looks up. The woman is little and hunched and ugly, but when she looks up her eyes are familiar.

“This has been going on for longer than I’ve worked here,” Vanessa says without a hello. “Hasn’t it?”

“Do I know you?” the little woman asks, fingers clicking on like the wind. Impressive, her ability to focus on two such separate paths of thought.

“I know you,” Vanessa says. “Joan Clayton.”

At last, the woman’s fingers go still on the keys.

“It’s an easy enough name to find,” she says. “No sense in keeping things confidential from the confidential files. And you’re Miss Ives, from upstairs. From double-oh.”

“That’s not all,” Vanessa says.

For a moment, Miss Clayton looks as though she’s going to get up and run. Vanessa closes her eyes.

_Are you a mole?_ she asks. _Or are you seeking protection?_

Miss Clayton doesn’t run.

“Why have you come to me now?” she asks.

“The war’s come to us,” Vanessa says, and as gingerly as she can, she offers Miss Clayton the face of an old ally. Or lover. Yes, she thinks, listening to the seething intake of breath between Miss Clayton’s teeth, lover.

She offers it from the fore of her own thoughts and does not push forward into Miss Clayton’s own: her thoughts, her history, is her own to give and to keep. For now.

Miss Clayton sighs, her head bending down with gallows weight, gallows anticipation. “I’m not a traitor,” she says very quietly, even as she says it where people might hear.

“I didn’t think you were.”

She looks up. “Then—”

“I want your help,” she says. “I want you to teach me. There’s just four floors between us, but we’re the same, aren’t we?” She chooses her words carefully: “Fearfully and wonderfully made.”

“And you’re the scorpion,” Miss Clayton says. “I never thought you were finished.”

Vanessa thinks of her life, the papers filed, the careers orbited. Malcolm’s grey hair and precarious hands and his imperfectly hollowed-out heart. Mr. Chandler’s connections, his steady aim. V’s sour-sweat focus, his blindness to everything but his own glorious path of ideas, heartbeat like a hummingbird’s as he makes them real. Sembene’s kindnesses, how much each one of them might cost. How she weighs on each of them. What she has to lose, within this building alone.

What she has lost already, and how to live with it. Only one remedy: to keep living, as she is, with _what_ she is.

Somewhere, she doesn’t know where, Hecate Aphrodite Livingstone is laughing; somewhere, Evelyn Poole might just have gotten what she wanted after all. They’ll be back, she thinks, but she’ll be ready. Time to shed her skin and become the next thing she’s meant to.

“I can’t hide,” she says. “I have people to keep alive.”


End file.
